Last updated on July 12th, 2023 at 11:33 pm
Mindful Health and the Power of Possibility
Rating
3/5
Date Started
5/9/2023
Date Completed
5/26/2023
Five Powerful Quotes from the Book
Quote 1
“Mindful health is not about how we should eat right, exercise, or follow medical recommendations, nor is it about abandoning these things. It is not about New Age medicine nor traditional understandings of illness. It is about the need to free ourselves from constricting mindsets and the limits they place on our health and well-being, and to appreciate the importance of becoming the guardians of our own health. Learning how to change requires understanding how we go astray. The goal of this book is to convince you to open your mind and take back what is rightfully, sensibly, and importantly yours…
“The research that I’ve described here (and in my three previous books on mindfulness) makes clear that actively noticing new things is literally and figuratively enlivening. Not only is it not tiring, it is exhilarating. It is the way we feel when we are fully engaged. There seems to me little reason not to begin applying mindfulness to understanding and attempting greater control over our health.”
Pithy Summary
Quote 2
“In most of psychology, researchers describe what is. Often they do this with great acumen and creativity. But knowing what is and knowing what can be are not the same thing. My interest, for as long as I can remember, is in what can be, and in learning what subtle changes might make that happen. My research has shown how using a different word, offering a small choice, or making a subtle change in the physical environment can improve our health and well-being. Small changes can make large differences, so we should open ourselves to the impossible and embrace a psychology of possibility.
“The psychology of possibility first requires that we begin with the assumption that we do not know what we can do or become. Rather than starting from the status quo, it argues for a starting point of what we would like to be. From that beginning, we can ask how we might reach that goal or make progress toward it. It’s a subtle change in thinking, although not difficult to make once we realize how stuck we are in culture, language, and modes of thought that limit our potential…
“Everything we find today that was presumed to be impossible yesterday could lead to a healthier respect for uncertainty and the general questioning of limits. All too often, however, the new finding only leads to a specific change in the theory generating it. It could do more by questioning the whole idea of limits.
“Questioning presumed limits is the essence of the psychology of possibility. Asking why we can’t become better even when we feel we are at our best and our healthiest is the only way we will ever know how good we can be. The psychology of possibility takes our desired ends as its starting point.”
Pithy Summary
Quote 3
“One reason people come to see being depressed as a constant condition is that when we are content we don’t check in with ourselves to see how we feel. We simply feel fine and go about living without gathering evidence about our feelings. When we grow depressed, we tend to ask why we are unhappy and gather evidence to support our depression. Thus, when we are depressed we ask why, and when we’re happy we don’t ask. As a result, when we become depressed we don’t have complete information about our mental state and we have little evidence supporting our happiness, which allows us to imagine we’re always depressed.
“What would happen if we were encouraged to notice how our depression right now was different from the way it felt yesterday? We would become more mindful about our mental state. When we use a single attribution, “depressed,” for our feelings, we are retreating into that term’s familiar and mindless meaning. We feel less than alive, in part or whole, because we are not living. We’re only existing. Now imagine if science led us to understand that there isn’t a single kind of depression but rather five or more similar but distinct kinds of depression and that it was our job to figure out which kind we had. Let’s say that we were told by doctors that we might experience more than one of them, and that we might have one kind of depression in the morning and another one in the evening, or even vacillate among a few of them throughout the day. Now, instead of a single-minded mindless focus on ourselves – the hallmark, I believe, of depression – we would be mindfully focused. The result of this search, ironically, might actually reduce our depression.”
Pithy Summary
Quote 4
“Solutions tend to come when we are specific about problems…
“Mindfulness, as I’ve studied it for more than thirty years, is the simple process of actively drawing distinctions. It is finding something new in what we may think we already know. It doesn’t matter what we notice – whether it is smart or silly. Simply noticing is what is important. When we do this, we will find ourselves in the present, more aware of context and perspective and ready to take advantage of opportunities that would otherwise go unnoticed. My social psychology colleagues are fond of saying that behavior is context-dependent. I am saying that if we are mindful, we can create the context.”
Pithy Summary
Quote 5
“Aging means change, but change does not mean decay. While the term development can be applied to changes over the entire life cycle of a person, the term is commonly taken to refer only to the first two decades of life. The influence of this attitude is persistent. Young people are described as “developing,” whereas persons changing in their later years are typically described as “aging.” It is like day and night, where day might formally refer to the entire twenty-four-hour span but is informally used to refer to the brighter side of day. So, too, aging has come to refer to the darker side of development. In this case, however, the nominal distinction has great consequence. To make changes in later life one must fight against all sorts of consensually held preconceptions before they are “recognized” as growth. This struggle for legitimate recognition would be less strenuous if development were cast in other contexts. Right now, our stereotypes about the negative aspects of aging prevail.
“For example, an eighty-year-old man is frustrated by the fact that he no longer can play tennis the way he could when he was fifty. But perhaps the problem is not that he can no longer play the same way but that he is still trying to do so…
“Because his social environment and mindless encoding of stereotypes has taught the eighty-year-old tennis player that his game is aging, not developing, it may never occur to him to adapt his game based on the identification of new skills. Because differences between young and old people are taken not as differences but as decrements, we are not likely to find ways that older people might metaphorically ‘change their game.’
“If we do begin to notice such potential adaptations, we might still make the mistake of seeing these changes as compensatory: ‘Since I can’t do it that way, I’ll do it this way.’ Instead, we could look for ways in which adaptations might be advantageous to individuals of all ages, we could thus learn from the very people we now feel sorry for.”
Pithy Summary
About the Book
Counterclockwise: Mindful Health and the Power of Possibility – Audiobook | Ebook | Hardcover – “If we could turn back the clock psychologically, could we also turn it back physically? For more than 30 years, award-winning social psychologist Ellen Langer has studied this provocative question, and now has a conclusive answer: opening our minds to what’s possible, instead of clinging to accepted notions about what’s not, can lead to better health at any age.
“Drawing on her own body of colorful experiments – including the first detailed discussion of her landmark 1979 “counterclockwise” study in which elderly men lived for a week as though it was 1959 and seemed to grow younger – and important works by other researchers, Langer proves that the magic lies in being aware of the ways we mindlessly react to cultural cues.”
About the Author
Ellen J. Langer – “Dr. Ellen Langer is a professor in the Psychology Department at Harvard University. Her books written for general and academic readers includeMindfulness and The Power of Mindful Learning, and the forthcoming Mindful Creativity. Dr. Langer has described her work on the illusion of control, aging, decision-making, and mindfulness theory in over 200 research articles and six academic books.”
Additional Resources
Tags
New Age | Nonfiction | Psychology | Self-Improvement